Xican@ Poetry Daily

For Max

Do not go gentle into that adios
fight,fight like the chicano kid,
bloom like the pastures of Nixon,Tejas…

Rage against the disappearance of the words,
words you shaped out of the Nothing
that the whites wanted you to have.

The stars glittered like we
dreamed the chicano movement
would sweep across Aztlan.

Cruising Culebra in the 1970’s in your
Volkswagen Beetle,we were heading here—–
it is only now we have arrived.

Like Musketeers we drew our words
and slashed at the enemy,
in our determined fashion.

We may not take our place
among the great chicano writers,
but,live by the word,carnal,live by the word!

Reyes Cardenas blogs HERE

It was tied with guitar strings

into a sack that held pigeon feathers,

the hair of lost dogs–cardboard

from a box of trinkets

he received from North Africa.

Garcia Lorca’s desk was a bundle

of things bearing down like an easy shot,

words recalled when discontent

was a shade of black,

coffee beans stolen in silence–

a clock over the hills waiting

for the next moon.

Garcia Lorca’s desk was a head

of lettuce, a bowl of goat soup,

the place where tiny hands

were named for their fingers,

ink spotting the pages to buy time

before three doors were slammed.

Garcia Lorca’s desk was his vow

to stir the rain with rootless awe,

then hide for years, come out

singing, reciting poems

from the warmth of laps,

paper flattened on the desk

so the sun could read.

Garcia Lorca’s desk was found

decaying in an empty field

where they lined him up,

the feathers falling out,

guitar strings rounding the sky

with wired light that sank

into the soft paper he used

to wipe his hands

before he was shot.

Consideration of the Guitar (published by BOA Editions, LTD) balances ample selections from award-winning poet Ray Gonzalez’s six previous books with thirty new poems. Gonzalez’s early poems are dominated by Southwest desert landscapes and deal with the pressure of conflicts between border cultures. More recent poems upend prevailing stories about historical figures, artists, and writers, create new animal myths, and push traditional boundaries of the free verse lyric deeper into surrealism. Consideration of the Guitar was a finalist for the 2006 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry.

It is true

man and all his stories

fill our speaking mouths with words,

sand so dry we can never spit it all out.

Our dreaming skulls cannot keep out

the constant pricking of old tales

but crack and break instead.

Our shadows are black

and thicken because so many

others have crossed this way before.

This is all too true.

But I swear

when our two bodies touch,

when my flesh and your flesh

wage the dance making life, the

gasp and grab like death,

there in the light of what we two do,

I am

one man

and I imagine you

one woman.

Berkeley, 1991

Alfred Arteaga

http://alfredarteaga.com/

Cantos
San José: Chusma House Publications 1991

“Arteaga was a pioneer in post-colonial and ethnic minority literature studies and an important early Chicano movement poet. He was an expert on the works of Shakespeare and the Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Arteaga originally joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1990 as an assistant professor of English and was tenured in the Department of Ethnic Studies in 1998.

Arteaga was interested in the collisions of different cultures and the resulting mixtures. His early focus on the Renaissance eventually merged with his later work on Chicano literature, particularly the merging of Western and indigenous influences in the Americas after European colonization as reflected in language and literature. His studies and teaching focused on the contributions of contemporary Chicano literature and music to American culture. He drew attention to the hybrid culture of Chicano writers by focusing on their hybrid use of language…”

Professor Arteaga died of a heart attack on July 4, 2008 in Santa Clara.

The eScholarship Editions collection includes almost 2000 books from academic presses on a range of topics, including art, science, history, music, religion, and fiction.

Access to the entire collection of electronic books is open to all University of California faculty, staff, and students, while over 500 of the titles are available to the public.

Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems:
History and Influence in Mexican-American Social Poetry
by José E. Limón

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

PREFACE

PART ONE POLITICS, POETICS, AND THE RESIDUAL PRECURSORS, 1848–1958

I Borders, Bullets, and Ballads: The Social Making of a Master Poem

2 Américo Paredes, Tradition, and the First Ephebe: A Poetic Meditation on the Epic Corrido

3 With His Pistol in His Hand: The Essay as Strong Sociological Poem

PART TWO SOCIAL CONFLICT, EMERGENT POETRY, AND THE NEW EPHEBES

4 Chicano Poetry and Politics: The Later Recognition of the Precursor

5 My Old Man’s Ballad: José Montoya and the Power Beyond

6 The Daemonizing Epic: Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales and the Poetics of Chicano Rebellion

7 Juan Gómez-Quiñones The Historian in the Poet and the Poetic Form of Androgyny

CONCLUSION

APPENDIX A HAROLD BLOOM: AN EXPOSITION AND LEFT CRITIQUE

APPENDIX B JUAN GÓMEZ-QUIÑONES, “CANTO AL TRABAJADOR”

APPENDIX C JUAN GÓMEZ-QUIÑONES, “THE BALLAD OF BILLY RIVERA”

Notes

INDEX

The American Indian Studies Center at UCLA is seeking poetry submissions for a fortieth-anniversary anthology commemorating its forty years of publishing books by and about Native peoples. We envision this anthology as a collection of materials by Indigenous poets directly connected to UCLA in the past forty years and those they have mentored or influenced.

Our aim is to illustrate and celebrate the ways that Native people present at the core of the American Indian educational movement have radiated their innovation and empowerment out to the community in all directions. Submissions do not have to be education-oriented.

Deadline: February 1, 2009

Find out more at LA BLOGA